A History of the American People

and former father-in-law, General Taylor, saw action at Monterrey and Buena Vista, and
distinguished himself in both these much publicized battles. The Mexican War, as we have
noted, was the great proving ground for future American bigshots, both political and military.
Davis was described by General Bliss, Taylor's chief-of-staff, as the best volunteer officer in the Army,' and President Polk offered him a general's commission. But he had been badly wounded in the foot at Buena Vista and chose instead to be nominated to the Senate. In politics Davis found it natural to be called the 'Calhoun of Mississippi,' and, when the old fire-eater died, to assume Elijah's Mantle. It was equally natural, when his friend Franklin Pierce became president, to accept office as war secretary, where he became perhaps the most powerful voice in the Cabinet and a forceful administrator. But his weakness quickly made its appearance. He got into a series of arguments with his general-in-chief, Winfield Scott, mostly over trivialities. Scott was arrogant and self-righteous too, but Davis, as his political superior, might have been expected to behave with more sense and dignity. One of Davis' letters to Scott ran on for twenty-seven foolscap pages and was contemptuously described by its recipient asa book.'
Everything fell into the hands of the press and made amazing reading. Scott closed his last letter:
Compassion is always due to an enraged imbecile,' to which Davis replied that he wasgratified
to be relieved of the necessity of further exposing your malignity and depravity.' Reading this
correspondence helps to explain why the Civil War occurred and, still more, why it lasted so
long. It certainly suggests that Davis was not a man fit to hold supreme office at any time, let
alone during a war to decide the fate of a great nation.
It was not that Davis was unperceptive. In some ways his views were advanced. He tended to
take the progressive line on everything except slavery. That pillar of Bostonian anti-slavery
rectitude, John Quincy Adams, commended him warmly for helping to get the Smithsonian set
up. And Davis was well aware of some of the South's weaknesses, especially its lack of industry.
Its one big industrial complex was the Tredegar Iron Works on the banks of the James River near
Richmond. It had been, as it were, replicated from the South Wales Tredegar works in the 1830s,
to serve the Southern railroads. It also made cannon, chains, and iron ships, and by 1859 was the
fourth-largest ironworks in the United States, employing 800 people. But it was near bankruptcy
because it was uncompetitive. It got its iron ore from Pennsylvania because Virginian sources
were exhausted, and virtually all its copper and bronze and many parts and machinery had to be
bought in the North or from abroad. It had to pay extra wages because white industrial workers
hated employment in a slave state. They particularly objected to working alongside slaves,
fearing to be replaced by them. The works was notable for high labor turnover, chronic labor
shortages, and neglect of innovation. It survived at all only because it gave liberal, risky credit to
Southern railroads. It seemed enormous, and so reassuring, to Southerners, but in the nation as a
whole it was marginal. There was in the South no central, up-todate industrial magnet to attract
skilled labor and so compensate for the many deterrents.
By contrast, a hundred miles or so to the north there was the beginning of a vast
manufacturing complex stretching from Wilmington to New York. From 1840 to 1860 this
megalopolis was the most rapidly growing large industrial area in the world-and it was this
complex which made inevitable, in military-economic terms, the South's ruin. Davis, knowing
the South's weakness, began urging it, from about 1850 on, to start stockpiling arms and
ammunition, to encourage immigration from the North, or to build railroads to transport its
agricultural products itself, to create an industrial base to manufacture its own cotton goods,
shoes, hats, blankets, and so on, and to provide state support for higher education so that its sons
were not forced to go to Northern universities and adopt their ideas. What finally happened to the